NAND Hard Drives???

[ziff73]

Any thoughts on when this technology will appear in Thinkpads? or atleast be compatible?

Solid State Hard Drives. - http://www.samsung.com/PressCenter/Pres ... 0000123980

thanks,
g

[K. Eng]

Unless the cost per MB drops a lot, we probably won't see a drive like that in a ThinkPad anytime soon.

I like Flash memory a lot, as it doesn't have any moving parts to break. Having suffered HDD failures before, I look forward to not having to worry about it.

[eigh]

that and with flash, you can only read write so many times, after that, it would be borked.

[K. Eng]

True, but the same holds for mechanically based HDDs. The motor will eventually wear out, the heads may crash, sectors can go bad and be unrecoverable, etc.

The question I would ask is whether the flash technology used in that drive is as durable as a mechanical HDD in terms of mean time between failures.

that and with flash, you can only read write so many times, after that, it would be borked.

[emorphien]

True, but the same holds for mechanically based HDDs. The motor will eventually wear out, the heads may crash, sectors can go bad and be unrecoverable, etc.

The question I would ask is whether the flash technology used in that drive is as durable as a mechanical HDD in terms of mean time between failures.

that and with flash, you can only read write so many times, after that, it would be borked.

So far the flash memory doesn't hold up. Sure you could use it for data storage, but if you're frequently accessing a part of the NAND disk for a swap file or whatever then it would wear out a lot faster than a hard drive. From what I've seen the MTBF of flash memory that does not require a current to hold data is considerably lower.

It's a sunday, I'm tired and I cannot remember the technobabble name for solid state memory that doesn't require a current (vs that which does like cache or RAM which can withstand more read/writes than a hard drive).